Cloud-based lead management solutions company Leads360 has released Leads360 Express, a sales CRM scaled down to meet the needs of small-business users.

The purpose of the product is to help sales teams better understand how leads are performing, and to determine which leads have been contacted, qualified, or converted over time. On the user side, Leads360 Express tracks lead activity by source, so a sales manager can measure differences between users to evaluate sales performance. The solution also offers industry-specific contact cards with prospect details and a prioritization engine to offer up the most important opportunities first.

"It prioritizes everything for you in a very intelligent way," comments David Nachman, executive vice president of product marketing and business development for Leads360. "It could be a new lead coming in, a new action you're taking for a lead that's already in the sales funnel, or it may be an appointment that's scheduled with a prospect for follow-up that's automatically funneled into the appropriate place in the workflow."

In addition to built-in workflow automation, Nachman says another critical component of the Express solution is integrated telephony using Leads360's cloud dialer Dial-IQ, which provides click-to-call functionality, as well as intelligent inbound call distribution. The Dial-IQ integration is available with the Leads360 Express "Make It Pour" plan at $64.99 per user per month. A basic sales CRM plan is available for $24.99 per user per month.

What drove Leads360 to produce a small-business version of its enterprise sales CRM solution was that during its own marketing efforts, "we saw tremendous lead volume in other vertical industries" outside of its historically strong base of financial services, insurance, and for-profit education clients, Nachman says. It turns out that 50 percent of its lead volume came from other industry verticals, which led Leads360 to tailor the Express product for 18 different verticals.

"What that means is, a lot of the product is very configurable to users out of the box," he adds. If a user is a wealth manager, for instance, data fields would be predefined to match the type of lead data they would typically capture. Automatic emails are triggered from the system based on various elements of the workflow associated with that industry vertical. The goal, Nachman says, was to empower small-business selling that required zero customization, and that offered a way for businesses to maximize their resources to drive productivity.